one thing, the pencil drawing was not the necessarily the final disposition. In Still-Life with Violin and Music, for example, the violin’s scroll has been significantly thinned. In other works, whole background elements have been painted over to simplify the compositions. He sometimes altered the subjects, removed handles from jars, tassels from pipes and shifted bits of paper or creased their corners as he painted.
While he used the pencil guides in his earlier paintings, the more he worked, the more often he applied his placement of objects directly on the background colour. Harnett used a pointed tool or the end of his brush to scribe a line in directly into the background and then painted into it. As he worked, he fattened jugs and shortened canes to maintain correct spatial relationships and scale to honour the composition. He continued to use some form of background drawing for object placement and painted his subject matter elements in front of each other, as they existed in reality.
William Michael Harnett, Cigar Box, Pitcher, and “The New York Herald”, 1880.
Oil on canvas, 20.1 × 19.7 cm.
Courtesy of Berry-Hill Galleries, New York, New York.
In his paintings of the late 1870s produced in Philadelphia, The Banker’s Table, painted in 1877, shifts Harnett’s subject matter from trivial collections of fruit, dishes, flowers, vegetables and other frivolous objects to hard currency and realities of commerce. His time in New York might have introduced him to these symbols of finance as the new icons of American progress. The country had shifted into the Industrial Revolution of factories and finance, mass production and rapid communications following the Civil War. Ledger books, an antique quill pen and a wad of bank notes held down with a coin wrapper of silver dollars sit next to what appears to be a gold Double Eagle. However, the activities, both social and industrial, of the Gilded Age were built on a foundation of unease, a corrupted morality that Harnett seems to grasp. Ashes spill from overturned pipes, crumbs litter table tops, age and patina darken well-handled instruments, brass is left unpolished and reveals the subtle dents of hard use. Nothing seems new.
He became involved with gathering both the symbols of national commerce and personal items as well: letter racks, business cards, addressed envelopes, newspapers, elements of after-work relaxation showing pipes, tobacco cans, musical instruments and recreation. His Cigar Box, Pitcher and “New York Herald” reproduces a variety of textures in a strictly male context that seem to have followed an event. There is a story-telling quality to the collection of objects. The pitcher anchors the right side while the wood cigar box of cheap Colorado Gold cigars is the Cigar Box, Pitcher and "The New York Herald" centrepiece. It is the details that tell the story. A Dutch porcelain pipe sans shank has a cigar butt stuffed into its bowl – a method pipe smokers use to enjoy a hot short cigar or cigarillo – with the burnt matches dropped casually on the table cloth. The viewer’s eye is drawn to the upside-down New York Herald banner of the half-folded newspaper beneath the jug, and a mug of tea, claret or other drink sits behind the cigars. Two biscuits with crumbs complete the scene as if waiting for the smoker to return and finish his snack and clean up the mess.
In 1880 Harnett sailed for Europe, the birthplace of trompe-l’œil painting. The style dated back to 400 B. C. and can be found in the murals recovered from the ruins of volcano-devastated Pompeii. A famous story from the historian Vasari tells of two competing trompe-l’œil artists who arranged a contest to see who could paint the most realistic scene. One artist painted a bowl of fruit with such faithful detail that birds fluttered down to peck at the grapes. Certain he had won, he turned to his rival and crowed loudly, “Draw back the curtains and reveal your painting!” The rival then knew he had won because the curtains were his painting. Another tale of the time told of Rembrandt’s pupils in his studio taking time to paint coins on the floor and then laugh uproariously when the master bent down to pick them up.
Murals painted in the Baroque and Renaissance by Andrea Mantegna, Paolo Uccello and Paolo Veronese utilised trompe-l’œil techniques in churches and palaces to open what architect Leone Alberti referred to as “windows into space”.
Harnett had earned enough with his painting sales in Philadelphia to support himself in Europe where he studied and exhibited his new works in London, and the Paris Salon, finally spending four years in Germany. His arrival in Munich at that time was fortunate as the influence of seventeenth-century Dutch art with its still-life tradition was just making itself felt in Munich in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. His still life paintings had received their typical good reactions among the people of London and Paris, but as usual the critics ho-hummed his style as boring. Painting was undergoing a loosening of styles, a freer use of brushes and palette knives, an explosion of colour and lighter schemes as the Impressionists began to make their presence felt. But in Munich, in the academy and the galleries, still-life pictures of cluttered interiors and aftermaths of hunting were all the rage on the burghers’ walls. Guns of all vintages leaned against drapery or rough wood panelling as game hung head down from lashings and pipes sprouted from tobacco canisters. Baskets, ceramics, brass and hammered tin flasks, pots, covered beer mugs and butchers’ cleavers lay strewn about. Harnett plunged into this œuvre adding Prussian bloody-mindedness to his compositions.
Considered his masterpiece series, after studying in Munich for three years, he began these paintings titled After the Hunt – a common German theme – substituting various objects within the same concept. Dead game hangs in front of an old door surrounded by guns, hats, game sacks, pipes on tethers, dented hunting horns, old-fashioned powder horns, knives and swords. These are large paintings, much larger than his previous works, but displaying the same level of excruciating detail and attention to lighting, texture and spatial relationships.
He also created a series of ‘dining room’ pictures that featured single dead animals: ducks, geese, or rabbits hanging in front of a plain background.
While the German artists preferred more austere scenes of plucked game, and very realistic dead creatures often with wounds showing, Harnett’s Merganser, painted in 1883, portrays an almost balletic duck arrested in a dignified swoon. Nary is a feather ruffled. The layers of feathers beneath the wing are sculpted and its breast is plump and undamaged. One leg is trussed up by a tether to a nail in the wall, but the other hangs languidly apart from the body in a gesture from Swan Lake.
Harnett produced four versions of After the Hunt and was sure this virtuoso demonstration of his skills would create his reputation in the fine art world instead of decorating saloons and billiard halls. He was wrong. Critics still harrumphed and turned away from yet another dead animal picture with no “soul”. In 1886 he returned to New York, set up a studio and continued to paint what and how he knew best.
One of the most recognised paintings from this period is The Faithful Colt, finished in 1890. The subject is an old 186 °Colt Army Model percussion revolver hanging from a nail through its trigger guard. Its treatment resembles the “dining room” pictures of dear game. The old pistol is nickel plated with worn ivory grips and shows wear from firing where gunpowder has pitted the plating where the cylinder meets the barrel’s breech. A general patina has flattened the shine and cracks appear in the grips where they meet the butt strap. An officer or cavalryman in the Civil War might have used this weapon, but at the time of the painting, guns that used loose powder, ball and percussion caps had been made obsolete by cartridges.
This work is one of only ten paintings completed in Harnett’s last four years of life. It was exhibited – like so many of his works – not in a gallery, but in the store window of Black, Starr & Frost, a New York jewellery store. Originally titled The Old-Fashioned Colt, this painting carried a literary title like his other works, After the Hunt, For Sunday’s Dinner, The Old Cupboard and The Old Violin to reduce the “illusionist” stigma that drew yawns from critics as being little more than mechanically slavish copies
